This just in: internet preferable to all previous human endeavor.

Although he had longed for it, after retiring from teaching and moving to a house in the woods, he became severely depressed. The diagnosis: loss of horizon.

Compulsive thinking, fitful sleeping, and endless, endless trips to the bathroom.

That year’s mingled scent of burnt coffee, jet fuel, lavatory disinfectant. Dismal at the time, now you’d give anything to have it back.

Wire’s rules of negative self-definition, 1977
1. no solos
2. no decoration
3. when the words run out, it stops
4. no chorusing out
5. no rocking out
6. keep to the point
7. no americanisms

I know you by your habits; the grooves you have cut in the world; the familiar boredoms I would miss beyond all else.

Alone in his hotel room he wrote:
I am strong. I am unafraid.
He took a sip of his drink and added:
I am over it.
He sat back and looked at what he had written.
None of it was true.
But for the first time in years, he could imagine it.

Such sky, such earth, such trees, such absent leaves (which will return), such peace (that won’t), all this past and future splendor I leave you.

Far too finely wrought to be good.

A great artist and an excruciating bore.

A late summer afternoon that already feels over. There was a life here, wasn’t there? You can almost still hear it. A wedding; you gave a speech that left no impression. This is how it will be after you’re gone. As if it never happened.

In the morning I hear the long shriek of the hawk, as if to say, I am all that matters. Death from above.

To feel the beauty in all of existence, but not in oneself.

He’d finally reached a minimum level of accommodation to his perception of reality.

Brick painted the color of brick, an object turned into a sign.

Life has once again forced an unscheduled change of attitude.